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I’ve never delved deeply into my 9/11 memories on this blog or anywhere else but since there seems to be a movement to “put 9/11 behind us” among some on the left I wanted to put forward why I can’t, and I won’t.

I was in grad school on 9/11, Wesleyan University in Middletown CT. I had moved to Connecticut to make a change in my life and dry out. I lived in a small apartment at the time that stank like oily Chinese food until I had spent most of my free time there smoking Djarums and watching an old tv without cable. I worked a couple of lousy jobs until I started a job at the Middlesex County Y.M.C.A. in their before and after school program where busy parents could drop their kids off two hours before school began and three hours afterward. And yes there were parents who left there kids there all five hours.

I usually slept between shifts unless I had a class. I usually scheduled classes at night because I was used to being up late, but once I decided to stop drinking I didn’t have much to do. I didn’t have many friends either, because the first time you tell your old drinking buddies you’re on the wagon is usually the last time you see them. So I sat up most nights and smoked, sometimes I walked around a little but often enough I just sit in my living room, me and two cats and a pack of clove cigarettes.

The night before the attacks I had smoked more than usual and I was out of cigarettes so instead of going home and catching a nap after my first shift I hit a local smoke shop and strolled home. I remember it was a nice day and everyone seemed happy. I had even gotten off work early, usually we could get the kids to their teachers by 8:30 or so but I think that day it was much earlier. So I went home with my pack of cigarettes and decided to watch the news while drinking a an iced coffee I got from the Dunkin’ Donuts next door to me.

When I turned on the television the first tower was already burning. My mother went through the Trade Center everyday and her office was on Church street so I was worried. As I watched and the story unfolded I got a sickening feeling this was no accident as the local news had reported. I was about to call my mother when I saw the second plane hit on live television.

I remember yelling “No!” to the screen, I remember being shocked but mostly I remember feeling helpless. By that time phones were already useless, I couldn’t get through to my mother, I couldn’t get through to my wife who was working at a college just outside of New York City and the only information I was getting was from the news. At some point I knew this was a war although at that point I remember thinking it was the Russians because they had used commercial aircraft to invade Afghanistan.

I especially remember there was a Cuban guy who worked some sort of food cart outside the towers who was interviewed and he kept going back into the burning towers to help people just before the collapse and I thought about the fact that, given how much time I spent there before I moved, I probably bought food from him. And now he was dead.

In that little Connecticut college town I watched the news show examples of heroism as the people in New York pulled together to try to save their fellow citizens, and I watched as reports of other planes crashing horrified the nation. I kept trying to reach my wife and my mother and I couldn’t. I was panicked and upset and was desperately trying to figure out a way to get to New York when the phone finally rang. It wasn’t my mother or my wife it was my boss. They needed me at work early because the teachers were leaving.

The same elementary school teachers who had spent a good deal of their time telling kids who weren’t old enough to vote that Bush didn’t care about them (I saw the campaign posters they had kids draw in support of Gore) had fled like rats because they were scared terrorists would target a tiny college town no one’s ever heard of. I have never been as disgusted as I was in the moment Matt, my boss, told me he needed people to come in to staff the program because the school was closing. The school was closing but the kids were still there.

Matt was a good guy though. He asked if I was O.K., he told me I could use the program’s line to call my family if I needed to. So I went in to work and spent much of the rest of 9/11 with some worried kids who we entertained with card games while I discreetly slipped off to call my wife and my mother. My mother at the time was one of those people covered in ash walking across the Brooklyn bridge while my wife was comforting the kids in her department who had loved ones working downtown. Not every teacher abandoned their post, but enough did.

It was the next day before I learned I still had a living mother and my wife was safe. That same day a little boy in the program, about 10-years-old, came up to me in the morning and asked if I saw the Trade Centers collapse. He then grinned and started talking about how cool it was. The site supervisor whisked him away before I could respond, though I frankly don’t blame a child for what the parents allow. His parents never apologized.

Those next few days I started hearing, on my campus, the first rumblings of how we were at fault, how we shouldn’t respond with violence, how the whole thing was a tragedy we could have avoided. I heard nothing of the heroism of the many who died or the cowardice of those in our midsts who abandoned children to hide in their living rooms while child care workers, many of whom were teens themselves, came to the rescue of the school system. And I especially didn’t hear about the unmitigated evil of those who planned and executed the attacks.

I already heard people saying we should put this behind us.

The thing about 9/11 I will never forget is that at time when I was changing my views on a lot of things, like drugs and drinking and the various givens of the Libertarian lifestyle I wanted until then to lead, I saw a little snippet of truth. I saw that there really are two kinds of people in this world. There are the people who are selling hot dogs from a cart one minute and the very next they are ready to sacrifice their lives to save others from a burning inferno, and then there are people who leave children in a building alone, afraid and confused when they get the slightest hint of danger. There are people who pray for the victims of 9/11 and there are those who desecrate their memory by implying they deserved to die.

I hear people say that 9/11 changed them but I think instead of changing me 9/11 taught me something. It showed me who people really are and who I wanted to be. Most of all it showed me who I didn’t want to be, another out of touch professor who couldn’t bring themselves to applaud the heroes of 9/11.

Most of our “elites” hate the country and the rest of the people in it. They think 9/11 is a joke, they think patriotism is wrong and they think the rest of us, no matter how educated, don’t matter. That’s the key to understanding the teachers who left the elementary schools that day and to the Wonkette staff who think 9/11 is an example of American over sentimentality. To them the people who died, the people who served admirably and the people who were moved by 9/11 just don’t matter.

Neither does America, neither does our troops or even the ideals of freedom and liberty for all. What matters to them is them. What matters is their comfort and their ability live in an untouched cocoon of ideological purity where all voices say the same thing and no man need the courage of their convictions. What matters to them is the world not seeing how weak, craven and repugnant they are.

It was tough returning to Wesleyan to finish my Masters, not because of the work or bad memories, but because I know what kind of people I meet on university campuses. I know they’d leave me in a fire if I was unconscious, I know they’d stand back and watch me be murdered and afterward they’d tell people I probably had it coming. I know that no matter how much they claim to be interested in the welfare of others that for most their true face is that of a coward who will never be there for you when the chips are down. Just being near people like that makes me sick.

That’s why, despite the exhortations of the left, I cannot “put 9/11 behind me” or move on. I see it in their eyes and their faces, the cravenness, the spite and the nihilism. 9/11 exposes people like that for what they are, which is why they are so ready to have it forgotten. But the lesson of 9/11 is not one that can easily be erased. There are heroes in this world and their are cowards, and you can tell which by what whether or not they honor the victims of 9/11.

Joyce Carol Oates represents the worst of white liberal culture. She is a sanctimonious, race-obsessed grievance monger who pompously lectures others on their personal failings with little insight into her own. She presents herself as a serious thinker and intellectual, but as her recent forays into social media (and most of her writings) prove, she simply bleats out whatever opinions the urban liberal herd accepts. She reached an absurd new low recently as she smugly suggested that most NRA members are whites and only want guns because they remember the riots of the 60s (even the ones born after the riots, I assume). So their desire to own guns … is racist.

Let’s accept her premise that the NRA is predominantly white and holding on to the memory of riots in the 60s, for the sake of argument. We’ll pretend there have not been other race riots in our recent history, or non-race riots like the ones we saw from OWS and Lakers fans. Even if her premise is correct that white people (except for the enlightened few who agree with her, of course) are afraid of rioters assaulting their houses and families, how is her conclusion — that defending your family is racism — acceptable in a free society?

I grew up in the 70s as the only biracial child in a predominately black area when Black Nationalism was at its height so I feel comfortable opining on this particular idea of racism as the refusal to be violently victimized. I learned about this the hard way and one of the main lessons I learned was that this demand for martyrdom was part of a backward morality foisted upon the black community by white Marxists through their bought and paid for bootlickers. These proxies for Oates and her ilk, people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, helped redefine racism as any activity that white radicals don’t like, self-defense against mobs being an example.

Oates was careful to use the 60s riots as an example rather than the Rodney King riots for a reason. The L.A. riots proved that people need to protect themselves during civil unrest. Many of us remember that the LAPD pulled out of Los Angeles for several days during the riots, leaving the citizens to their own devices while hundreds of thugs and criminals rampaged through the city. More than 60 people died in the rioting, many murdered by the mobs; 2,400 people were injured and almost 7,000 rioters were arrested.

According to Oates those that tried to defend themselves, their families and their property were racists and those that put plans into place to do the same in the case of future civil unrest are racists. For collectivists like Oates, the mere desire to not be at the mercy of a mob is racism.

To understand how backward this is, think about what Oates and her ilk don’t consider racist.

Hate crimes against blacks are up due to Latino gang violence and even the SPLC has been forced to admit that gangs made up largely of Mexican nationals are “ethnically cleansing” many cities. This is allowed to continue because people like Oates can’t be bothered to mow their own lawns or pick their own lettuce. But sacrificing dozens of black lives for cheap labor isn’t racist?

Teachers in our country are rewarded and applauded for presiding over a public education system where blacks have a 40% drop out rate nationally. The fact that almost half of black teens don’t graduate from high school is not considered an abysmal failure of the public schooling system and teachers would seem like racism to me. But not to Oates.

Robert Byrd recruited people into the Ku Klux Klan and obviously many of those people went on to assault and murder blacks. White liberals kept him in political office for decades after that. Isn’t overlooking his personal hand in ethnic terrorism aimed at his fellow Americans evidence of racism among his supporters?

Oates’ own theory about gun owners and their racism implies that rioting is something unique to black Americans. Yet we have seen in our recent history this is not the case. OWS, the WTO riots in Seattle and the disastrous Woodstock ’99 prove that rioters, rapists and thugs come in all colors. Oates’ theory is overtly racist at its core, but her inability to be introspective, or perhaps her dishonesty, leads her to project that racism on gun owners.

These theories of gun owner racism are a byproduct of white liberalism’s fetishized vision of black Americans as non-humans. They see blacks (and Latinos, frankly) not as individuals, but as a swarming mass that will sweep through the America they hate so much, washing away the sins of this so-called white race (made up of dozens of different ethnic groups) and leaving the enlightened few to lead our country to the Utopia leftism promises. Sound familiar? It’s the same scheme Charles Manson came up with in the 60s.

The “racism” of wanting to protect your family from mobs is not about your feelings about race — it’s about your unwillingness to martyr yourself in the race and class struggles that occupy the lurid fantasies of the armchair revolutionary.

No gun owner cares what race potential assailants are. No one who takes the threats of mob violence seriously, whether they are race rioters or union thugs or gang rapists, makes plans contingent on what the ethnic makeup of those mobs might be. This is not a minor issue for us. The Left will use the racism argument to sway young city people and create a generation of people who equate the ability to defend your home from multiple, determined attackers with bigotry and prejudice. If they are successful, the long term consequences to our personal liberty are incalculable. That is why it is important that we stop this strain of thought from infecting more people through unchallenged media saturation.

One of the ways we can do this is to point out the overt racism of the people promoting this nonsense. If gun owners hated black people, they’d support Planned Parenthood’s depopulation of the black community, they’d support a school system that condemns almost half of black students to a lifetime of poverty and they’d support unfettered immigration by the Latino gangs that murder blacks in droves. By and large, gun owners don’t support those things. But Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Moore and all the other self-appointed gun control spokespeople on the Left do. They are the racists and need to be exposed as such.